Human resources are like natural resources; they’re often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they’re not just lying around on the surface.

Ken Robinson used this line in the context of his long-running critique of industrial-era schooling and workplace cultures that treat talent as a narrow, standardized commodity. In talks and writing from the 2000s onward—especially those arguing for creativity, personalized learning, and broader definitions of intelligence—he compared human potential to natural resources: valuable, unevenly distributed, and frequently undiscovered because institutions don’t search in the right places. The remark typically appears as part of an argument that education and organizations should be designed to “mine” diverse aptitudes through opportunity, encouragement, and varied pathways rather than sorting people by a single measure of ability.

The quote argues that talent is not always visible or immediately legible to standard tests, credentials, or first impressions. Like oil or minerals, human capacities can be hidden by circumstance—poverty, lack of access, discouragement, or systems that reward only certain skills. Robinson’s metaphor also implies agency and responsibility: societies and institutions must actively explore, invest, and create conditions for discovery, rather than assuming ability will naturally “surface.” The deeper significance is a challenge to deficit thinking: apparent underachievement may reflect unrecognized strengths and mismatched environments, not an absence of potential.